Installment 2!
So we left for Cherbourg for a ‘taste of France’ which involved a group of us taking a break from the ship food (which seems to be getting worse – some of it you wouldn’t even feed your dog) and eating at a French restaurant by the port. It took over an hour to get my Moules Frites de Camembert, and when it did come it seemed to be lacking in cheese, Then half way through the meal a waitress suddenly appeared opposite me, whipped it away Basil Fawlty style and disappeared back to the kitchen. It came back 2 minutes later with big chunks of Camembert all over it!
Since the DJ has left I now have a new room mate - Mike the guitarist from Canada. He’s a great guy, very laidback and can talk for hours. He obviously thinks I’m a bit smelly as he suggested we buy an air freshener after I’d over done it a bit on the lentils one day! We had our first rough crossing over to New York. Not many people getting seasick though – if you don’t turn up to work due to seasickness then you don’t get paid! We have had to cancel a few shows though as it’s too dangerous for the dancers. Since we are sleeping in the depths of the ship it’s very noisy at night with waves crashing around, and when they drop the anchor it sounds like we’re being bombed.
Working on the ship is more like being in the Navy than I expected. We have a cabin inspection each week, random drug tests and lots of safety briefings. I know everything there is to know about fire extinguishes, or at least I thought I did until Nigel, the Chief Officer and angriest man alive interrogated me during the passenger drill in New York:
‘Where’s your nearest Powder extinguisher?’
‘Over there’
‘What colour is it?’
‘Blue’
‘What sort of fire can you extinguish with it?’
‘Any type of fire’
‘Where’s your nearest Co2 extinguisher?’
‘Over there’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Not 100%’
‘I can see from here that it’s a water extinguisher you idiot! You need to know where your Co2 extinguisher is incase there’s an electrical fire!’
‘But I know where the powder one is, and that extinguishes everything’
‘Don’t answer back, I’m chief officer!’
There is an ongoing joke during the lifejacket demonstration. The teamleader of our station announces to the passengers- ‘ladies and gentleman, please do not attempt to put your lifejacket on until the crewmembers have finished the demonstration, I repeat, do not put on your lifejacket until AFTER the demonstration.’ At this point we start demonstrating how to put the jackets on, and immediately 90% of passengers copy us, so that all you can hear is the rustle of Velcro as they manoeuvre their jackets. I always shake my head in disbelief and share a smile with the handful of people that have actually been listening.
We left New York for the Caribbean, and after 4 weeks of miserable North Atlantic weather we were finally able to bask in some sun! It takes 3 days to sail down to St Thomas, where I stepped off at 9am to hunt for the nearest beach. First of all you need to wade through a jungle of duty free shops and taxis to get to the road. The place was crawling with big lizards. I had been given directions to the beach but somehow took a wrong turn and slogged up a massive hill in the boiling heat only to find farmer Giles at the top. I tried to ask him for directions but I had no idea what he was saying (supposedly they speak in English).
It turned out the beach was just ten minutes walk down to the road. It’s owned by a Best Western Hotel, so you pay 5 dollars to get a deck chair, and then relax and enjoy the paradise – palm trees, white sand, warm clear water. I can’t believe that I get paid to sit on tropical beaches! Leaving St Thomas I spied a huge fin swimming past the ship which I like to think was a massive shark, although it could have been something else. The next day was St Lucia, which has recently been hit by a hurricane, so was a lot of flooding, but a group of us got a taxi to Rodney Bay where locals were constantly trying to sell us bird tables for some reason! I had a go at wakeboarding, which was good fun. The taxi driver told us he was the St Lucia squash champion and had competed in the Manchester Commonwealth games a few years ago. This I understood through hand signals and asking him to repeat a few times.
Next stop was Grenada., land of spices. Here the ship is too big to dock so we anchored a few hundred yards out and arrive by tender boats. Once on land we boarded a water taxi that took us across to a bay which is amongst the National Geographic’s top ten beaches in the world. It was very nice but not as good as the beach at St Thomas which doesn’t make the top ten. I fancied a bit of time on my own so walked to the end of the beach and sat under a palm tree to read my book. After a while I stripped off to go for a swim, only to find that when I’d got back my watch was gone! As much as I’d like to accuse someone of stealing it, I don’t remember seeing anyone walk by, so it must have got lost in the sand or washed away. I spent half an hour searching for it until a guy came wandering along with his guitar and asked me what was wrong. I told him I’d lost my watch and he told that ‘time don’t matter man’ and that I should just chill and take it easy. I tried to explain that time did matter and that if I wasn’t back by 4.30 I’d be stuck in Grenada and would get sacked, and then he sang an improvised song about me losing my watch which cheered me up a bit. Unfortunately I didn’t have any money to pay him for this pleasure so I told him that if he found my watch he could keep it.
Barbados was great fun. Everyone heads to a place called ‘The Boatyard’, which is a huge beach bar with a live band, volleyball, jet skiing, banana boats, ropeswings off a pier etc – great fun! The sea is a bright green and you can see fish swimming around you. I got stung by a jellyfish but it was worth it! The final destination was Grand Turk, which unfortunately I couldn’t see as I had In Port Manning, but we just found out that we won’t be going there any more as the ship was too big for the dock and it took too long to get everyone off on tender boats. So for the upcoming cruises we will go to Dominica or St Maarten instead.
So everything is going very well. The other day I received a white star card which means that a passenger found my service excellent and has taken it upon themselves to write a letter of recommendation to Cunard. I was delivered a copy and it turns out that 2 Canadian blokes enjoyed my playing and think that I have ‘verve’. They also mention that they had the ‘pleasure of discussing musical topics’ with me on deck, which is weird because all I remember talking about is what would happen if you jumped off the side of the ship in the middle of the night! I also received a gift from some guests who know Dad – they basically left me a bag full of their left over suncream, shampoo, toothpaste, gin and rum which was nice!
I’ll finish with a ship horror story that keeps cropping up...apparently 2 years ago there was a couple of Filipino guys (apparently this is the correct way to spell it) who were competing for a promotion on the ship. When the news came out and the successful guy was celebrating in the crew mess, his competitor strolled in with a copper hammer and smacked him twice in the head, killing him, before throwing the hammer in the bin and walking back to his room. This caused an angry mob of Filipinos to congregate outside his room with various weapons in the hope of doing a similar thing to him, but the ship security arrested him, and he’s now serving a life sentence in an English prison. There’s a plaque on the crew mess wall in memory of him. So we don’t mess with the Filipinos!
